A Quick Guide For Beginners When It Comes to Sleep Tracking Apps For The Apple Watch (and more)

I don't know about you but to me, a good night sleep might be better than owning shares at Apple Inc these days.

Can you believe that?

Actually, having enough quality sleep is very important for your overall health and productivity, and in our modern world, sleep deprivation is a real problem.

There are multiple causes for sleeping disorders, among them being our obsession for gadgets (you know, taking your iPhone to bed and playing/browsing the internet is one of the main culprits when it comes to sleeping disorders) and our lifestyle.

We're way too sedentary, we eat the wrong foods before going to bed, we consume too much caffeine in our beverages, loads of sugar in our foods (sugar keeps you up at night), we're too stressed at work, we work long hours (as in too much), we exercise too little and so on and so forth.

The good news is that technology is trying to help us in that regard. You know, technology, which is one of the culprits for our lack of sleep (or decreased quality of sleep)...that's kind of ironic, isn't it?

So, say hello to "connected" sleep, a new and booming trend in technology which aims at increasing the quality of our sleep by constantly monitoring our movements in bed (don't think about nasty things), our respiratory/heart rate info and translating all this data into stuff that we can check out on our Apple Watch or iPhone when the sun rises.

Pretty interesting stuff, don't you think?

Hence, today we'll take a look at some of the best sleep tracking apps on the market compatible with the Apple Watch.

This is the first native sleep tracking application for the Apple Watch since the release of the watchOS 2 and I bet that it's going to be followed by a "gold rush" in the months to come.

However, since this is the first one, we must pay homage to it and give it the credit it deserves.

This application aims at tracking your sleeping habits during the night (or whenever you sleep) by using Apple Watch's sensors, more precisely the motion capture feature, for recording your movements during your sleeping hours.

Hence, you should keep your Apple Watch fully charged when you go to sleep. When you wake up, you'll be served with the "metrics", i.e. how long were you in the "deep slumber" and when you were agitated.

The app can also feed the info about the quality of your sleep to the Health app in your iPhone. This application is fully featured and it's absolutely free of charge; if you want to track your sleeping habits using a native app specially designed for the Apple Watch, well, this is it.

To get an idea, for a solid 8 hours sleep, the Sleep ++ app will drain approximately 10% of the battery, which is not bad at all in my book.

Sleep Pulse is a classic sleep tracking app designed for iPhone initially, but now it seems to be fully compatible with the Apple Watch. This is among the first applications in the world for the smart watch which can be used with Health Sync and it provides you with a thorough analysis of your nightly heart rate, sleep duration and heart rate trends.

Zleeper is nice and simple, allowing you to toggle the sleep mode when you get in to bed to monitor your sleep pattern. The other great thing about this app is that you can set a smart alarm to wake you up in your light sleep 15 to 30 minutes before the alarm, waking you at the optimal time.

The companion iPhone app will analyze your sleep pattern and display the corresponding information, such as; time in bed, sound sleep, light sleep, and sleep efficiency. While you sleep the iPhone app will display a clock view and sound a back up alarm if needed.

Here comes another sleep tracking app which works excellent on the Apple Watch, providing you with loads of useful information, such as reviewing your sleep quality and duration, tracking your sleeping habits and syncing the data with the Health app via the Health Kit sync/integration

Heart Analyzer is a simple app to view and understand your heart rate. It can also analyze sleep patterns to provide accurate resting heart rates. For sleep tracking, you don't have to tell it 'Im going to sleep' or 'Ive just woken up', it does it automatically. The app can calculate when you went to sleep and woke up. It then uses this data to produce really accurate day and night resting heart rates!